Losing on the search page because the price meant something different

The brand's business had always been cases. A case of 500 mailers at $148 is a completely normal industrial price, and the per-unit cost beat every competitor on the page. The problem is that nobody on a search results page performs division. Beside a competitor's pack of 25 at $19, the listing simply read as the expensive one, and a shopper filtering by price never saw it at all.

The damage was mostly invisible in the account's own reports, because it happened before the click. Impressions were healthy, click-through rate was a quarter of the category norm, and every internal conversation blamed the images. The images were fine. The number underneath them was answering a different question than the one the shopper was asking.

We made the catalog's prices comparable before trying to make them attractive.

• Quantity tiers added to every core SKU — a small pack, a mid pack and the case, so the brand appears at the price point shoppers are scanning for.
• Quantity moved to the front of the title, because on a phone the count is often the only qualifier visible before truncation.
• The case repositioned as the value option, with the saving against the small pack stated on the page rather than left as arithmetic.
• Campaigns pointed at the mid pack, which is the size that both wins the price comparison and carries a paid click.

Click-through rate rose from 0.29% to 0.72% and revenue grew 70% in six months.

Average units per order fell by nearly two thirds, which sounds like a loss and is not: far more orders, more new customers, and the case still sells — it now sells to people who arrived through the small pack and worked out for themselves that the case is cheaper. Impression share on the core terms nearly doubled, because a listing that gets clicked gets shown.